Worthing Flash

She wanders the fields where the elms once stood. Nothing stands there now, only the winter grass and a cold wind barrelling down the hill to the broken willow. Close to the edge of the stream, she dives into her coat pocket coat for the seeds and crumbs she keeps. She will wait for them to arrive; their fluttering wings matching the fluttering in her heart. No one knows she comes down here, day after day. Especially when the snows come, especially then. She won’t worry. Her feet have trodden these paths for eighty years – they belong to her now. Like the fox that passes each evening, they inhabit her dreams.  This story is by Bronwen Griffiths. Bronwen Griffiths is the author of, A Bird in the House , 2104, Not Here, Not Us – stories of Syria, 2016 , and Here Casts No Shadow , 2018. Her flash fiction, short stories and poems have been widely published. When writing this piece, Bird Woman , she was thinking of the walks she did as a child and a teenager growing up in North ...

Et Iterum Brutum (and Brutus again) Gaius couldn't help but grin behind the scroll he was carrying, using it now to hide the insulting expression. But really, Marcus was a funny little man, with his strange philosophies. In fact, Gaius was rather worried; Marcus was a scholar, a statesman, a lawyer and an accomplished orator, and the very idea of his that somewhere out there in the great expanse of the universe there were alternative worlds, alternative realities – well, it just didn't make sense for such an intelligent man to make such asinine declarations, so maybe his friend was ill. But he had no more time for Marcus Cicero today. It was the Ides of March and he had to get to the forum where the last of the public trials of the conspirators who tried to assassinate him was being held, putting to bed once and for all the tyranny of these plotters. They had all confessed to their plans and the motives therefor, and once this last would-be murderer had been dispatched...

A story by Annemarie Musawale Chapter One: Apocalypse Now Paula Domitia wiggled her way from under the pile of rocks she’d been hiding under shielding the baby in the groove of her abdomen. It had been almost a week since she’d seen the light and she didn’t know what was waiting out there. She’d kept an ear out, listening for the things. The things that used to be her neighbors, her family, her friends. Now they were just…mouths and hands and destruction. They would eat anything; concrete, steel, brick, flesh, bone or blood. The comic books had gotten it all wrong. Zombies didn’t eat brains. Or maybe these weren’t zombies. Maybe they were just horrible mutations brought about by radiation, global warming and adaptation to the befouled air. It had started so slowly, so insidiously that hardly anyone noticed. CNN first called it a new craze; people craving stones to eat. There was precedent after all. Pregnant women were known to eat stones now and then. For...